reohn2 wrote:I wouldn't pay £130 for handlebars,if Jeff Jones and Spurcycle weren't so greedy and charged realistic prices for their stuff I'd probably be more inclined to see their POV and they'd sell more bells and handlebars.
The bars are certainly very expensive compared to most other handlebars, but I think it's wrong to simply jump to the conclusion that Jeff Jones is greedy,
I think that when he started to develop the bars he made them in titanium himself, like his frames at the time. They were a very niche and even more expensive item then, and it probably took him some years to persuade potential customers and the cycling press of their merits. Eventually sales would have risen to the point where he did not have the capacity to make the bars himself, and instead the volumes were large enough for an order to get them made in Taiwan or China. The numbers involved were still small and he was still refining and tweaking the design. Increasing awareness and sales probably meant he got to a point where he could get a manufacturer to make a larger order in butted aluminium, which is both lighter and less expensive than titanium. More recently he has introduced a plain guage aluminium version which costs less.
In other words, it's been a long haul for him to develop the bars, refine the designs, and build up sales. He has had to start out small, and I imagine that each time he submitted an order to his manufacturer, he has increased the size of the order as sales have increased. He has effectively created the market for his bars from scratch, because the design was so unusual and nothing really like it existed beforehand. And after all those years a knock-off merchant has ripped off his design. It's not surprising that they are able to sell their version for a lot less:
- they've incurred none of the development costs
- they can take advantage of the market/demand for the bars that Jeff Jones has slowly built up: no need to start up small with a modest production run, instead the market is now large enough to take advantage of producing very large orders to maximise economies of scale.
Which brings us back to the issue of the lack of protection for small innovators. Although Titec briefly licensed an early version of his bars, and Surly bought and fitted them for some years to some of its bikes, the lack of design protection probably meant that it was unlikely that he could do a deal with a large component manufacturer to buy the design or make them under license: why pay for that when it's clearly not realistically possible or practical to prevent other manufacturers in China just copying the design anyway, and the likes of Planet X buying and selling them. So Jeff Jones was probably left with no choice but to continue selling the bars through the small network of distributors and dealers that sold his frames, which inevitably limited potential sales, and consequently also limited order sizes and the potential to reduce prices by making much larger orders for bigger volume discounts.
What I think is particularly wrong is to characterise him as greedy, when there is no evidence for doing so. We don't know the margins and profits on his bars, nor how much profit his business makes overall, but I doubt he is doing anywhere near as well as the owner of Planet X. But like I said, maybe telling yourself that he is greedy makes you feel more comfortable about buying a knock-off of his bars.
Edit - With regard to the US vs UK pricing, that is something commonly complained about for lots of goods. I think US prices often omit sales tax, because it will vary depending on which state the buyer is in. Importing the bars from the US will attract both 20% UK VAT plus a tariff as well.
